Small, low-power battery operated radios are desirable for many applications where remote sensing and communication is required. For example, wearable, medical monitoring devices, bridge diagnostic sensors, and remote sensor arrays in general. For these devices, size and low-power may help with their installation in inaccessible locations. As such, battery operation is a must and long operational life between battery changes or charges may be desirable. In the context of radios, external matching networks may increase their size and cost due to the number of components conventionally needed, e.g., 7 to 10 per radio. Conventional small radios may utilize multiple broadband stages, which are power hungry at high frequency due to the high capacitive loads. Thus, there is conventionally a trade-off between size and power performance.
Low-power communication devices for microcontrollers are highly desirable. Conventional communication devices tend to require 7 to 10 external components for frequency tuning, impedance transformation between antenna and the RFIC, and to be compliant with governmental requirements concerning RF communications. To reduce Silicon area, conventional implementations also tend to utilize multiple broadband stages to drive capacitive load at high frequency, leading to power hungry implementations. Cost and time to market may be other concerns of current microcontroller manufacturers. The high number of external components may increase both cost and time to market due to design constraints. Additionally, filtering out-of-band harmonics from the carrier signal is of concern as well.